Now that our covers are unwatermarked, there's never been a better time to show off some of the amazing video game cover art scanned by MobyGames members. And that's just what is happening at the MobyGames Twitter feed, which is updated daily with new pics. It's actually doing pretty well, if you look at the number of retweets and favorites for each post.

When we started this, we asked MobyGames Approvers for some cover picks, and now we'd like your help! Please comment on this post and pick some of your favorite cover art on the site, and we'll gradually flow it onto Twitter (and Facebook/Google+, as time permits!)

So sad to hear today that Nintendo President Satoru Iwata passed away - and at the relatively young age of 55, too. Many people online are linking to the MobyGames profile of Iwata, which only exists because MobyGames contributors typed in the credits for literally hundreds of seminal Nintendo games. The site admins would like to honor Iwata-san for his vital contribution to the history of games, & thank all of you for doing so much to preserve his history - even before his sad and unexpected passing.

Gigantic congratulations to LepricahnsGold who has made it to 100,000 contribution points on MobyGames!! He is only the 6th ever user to make it to that historic milestone - the others being Sciere, Cor13, [formercontrib!], Kabushi, and Patrick Bregger.

As part of an attempt to bring MobyGames at least tentatively into the 21st century (ho ho!), we'll now be alternately featuring a 'This Day In History' game and a 'Cover Of The Day' on MobyGames' Twitter feed. Please check it out, follow us, and try to fave/RT us as much as possible so we can grow our social media following!

After a long week of reprocessing work, the entirety of our 271,573 box covers and 680,458 screenshots are watermark free!

Additionally, we now display them at a higher quality (less compression and larger). We hope these changes will make MobyGames just that much better of a resource for the gaming community at large.

Other sites, YouTubers, bloggers and so on should always feel free to make use of these assets. Though we would greatly appreciate attribution back to MobyGames, so we can ensure our contributor base remains healthy and can grow. Without them, the 95,000+ game entries with countless credits, trivia and other information would simply not exist.

Not only is every piece of information here submitted by gamers, but it also goes through an approval process to ensure it's as accurate as possible. This is a huge amount of work, and we always need more contributors and approvers to help maintain (and improve!) our mission of being the most complete and accurate database of game information possible.

We now have 50,000 unique games documented in our database! Every single game was hand entered by contributors and carefully verified by our approvers.

A huge thanks to the thousands of MobyGames contributors over the past 15 years who've helped us reach this point! Including each platform release, we are currently at 94,818 total game listings for 165 platforms. You can see the full breakdown by platform here.

To help mark the occasion, we're announcing our plan to remove the MobyGames watermark from all covers and screenshots. This has been in the works for a while and we'll soon be re-processing all 675,000+ screenshots and 270,000+ covers.

Just a quick note on the front page to make sure everyone knows we've been updating MobyGames - our code as well as loads of new items - over the past few weeks!

In code and format additions, the Changelog is up to date, and includes a number of new game systems - including Windows Apps - and some notable security updates, as well as lots of affiliate link fixes - massive thanks to Nelio!

Elsewhere on contributions, we're rapidly approaching 50,000 unique games - more on that when we get there - and wanted to give some shoutouts to MAT and piltdown_man, who got to 80.000 points this year.

Also some great new milestones in points were reached by Sciere, ryanbus84, Thomas Petterson and more - and thanks to new contributors Kennyannydenny and Jennifer McMurray! Onward and upward...

Just a short note that, tragically, former MobyGames contributor PolloDiablo, aka Astrid Beulink (who is ranked in the Top 60 all-time on Moby) lost her battle with cancer earlier this month, according to Adventure-Treff (German-language). Astrid - who posted in the Approver forum in November to update us on her progress - was very active in the adventure gaming community in particular as a beta tester and contributor. She will be missed by all of the communities she supported, including us here at Moby.

Each coloured shape in the graph represents a platform. Horizontal axis is time. The vertical axis represents the number of games released. So the height of a shape on a given point in time indicates the number of games released for that platform that year. The total height of the graph on a given point in time shows the total releases that year.

Of course the graph is only as complete as our database is.

Notable changes:

I've changed to a different colour scheme. It may be a bit harder on the eyes, but with some macro magic I tried to keep related platforms similar colours. For example all Microsoft platforms are shades of orange, Apple is green, Sony is blue, Nintendo is red, ZX is purple, and because there are only so many colours Commodore is a different shade of green. I also grouped brands with only one platform into similar colours based on the type of platform (console, handheld, pc, etc.)

I'm now using MobyGames data for Arcade games, this means that there are much fewer arcade games shown in the graph this year. Although we managed to document an impressive 1525 in the last year, that's nowhere near the 8000+ of arcade-history.com

7004 new games compared to last year's graph, in spite of the huge decrease of Arcade games!

Well, it's that holiday time of the year, and we're finishing up with a bang! Two things, this time! First, as the ever-delightful Karsa Orlong points out in a PM to me: "New records: - the first four top contributors (FatherJack, Sciere, Karsa Orlong, 666gonzo666) beat their annual records with FatherJack setting the all time year to year record - Sciere set a new annual record of approvals (beating my 60k approvals from 2013), what is the proof, together with contributions points record, of his alien deep space cybernetic origin!"

Second, Kabushi continues to add new platforms, and if hyou follow this forum thread, you can see them being piled up in _real-time_, which is awesome. Just added is the Bally Astrocade, among a number of others. Finally, once again - thanks to EVERYONE who makes MobyGames' continued success possible - and have a wonderful Xmas & New Year!